The art of resilience

A year after the flood, a local photographer helps Jamestown continue to heal through an interactive photography project

0

A few years ago, photographer Peggy Dyer had what she says in “yoga terms” — Dyer herself is a yogi — one might call “a spiritual awakening.”

“Some would call it a devastatingly heart-crushing lawsuit,” she adds with a laugh, but there was little funny about the situation. Dyer was also going through a divorce. But she says at the time she felt confident about the case.

And then she lost. “I was devastated, just seriously flattened. I couldn’t leave my house,” Dyer says, recalling her depression. But when she did finally leave her Boulder home after a few days to get some food, she says she’ll never forget what happened. Standing in line at Noodles and Company, blearyeyed and still shaken to her core, she heard a small voice calling out her name.

“And it was this little five-year-old boy. He had been at a fundraiser I did for an elementary school about two weeks before the lawsuit,” says Dyer. “He remembered my name because I had asked him [at the fundraiser] if he liked ice cream, and in that moment I realized this is who I get to be in this world, and no one gets to take that from me.”

Despite other obstacles to conquer — Dyer was homeless for a while, living out of a camper with $50 to her name after paying all the fees associated with the lawsuit — she just kept “being Peggy.”

Driving into Boulder one February evening in 2009, Dyer had a flash of inspiration (motivated, she says, by a lyric from Bon Jovi’s song “Dead or Alive”). It was at that moment that she formed the concept for the One Million Faces project, Dyer’s personal mission to photograph a million people while raising money for charities and, most importantly, bringing communities closer together through laughter and interactive art. She’s been all over the country, photographing soldiers leaving for tours of duty and people living with Parkinson’s disease, but she’s also played a role in the post-flood healing process for many people in Boulder County. It all started with Dyer photographing children from

Lyons Elementary on their first day back at their school after last September’s historic flooding forced the students to relocate to Longmont Elementary. This weekend she’ll help the residents of Jamestown continue their healing process through her signature style of photography at the town’s “Rebuilding Jamestown” flood commemoration event.

The process is pretty simple — grab a white board, write a message about your flood story, have your picture made. On Sept. 12 and 13, residents of Jamestown will get the opportunity to use their individual stories to tell the collective narrative of how the flooding of September 2013 forever changed their town of less than 300 people.

While Friday’s event will be open to the public, Saturday’s commemorative event will be private.

“There’s a very somber mourning process that some people are still working through,” says Erika Archer, assistant to Jamestown’s mayor and the town’s flood project manager. “This is a community that’s been put in the eyes of the media quite a bit. So this event is a release for people to remember together and… if there is a celebration, it’s that the community has survived, but [healing and rebuilding] is a private process for a lot of people.”

Archer reminds that there is still much healing and rebuilding to be done in Jamestown. She says that somewhere around 80 percent of the residents are back on town water, but that water isn’t drinkable, leaving folks reliant on water brought in from organizations like the Red Cross. The remaining 20 or so percent of residents are still using cisterns.

The Red Cross is responsible for funding Dyer’s art project in Jamestown. Mary Steffens, a Red Cross flood recovery specialist who’s worked in Jamestown since last September, says that while the organization isn’t in the business of funding art projects, this is much more about building emotional resiliency than creating art.

“When you talk to Peggy, you can see it in the way she presents it — it’s about the interconnectedness of human beings and … I don’t know … especially now at the one year mark, you realize people are still struggling and people still aren’t back in their homes and people do forget that floods still happen,” Steffens says.

Steffens, who works on flood recovery efforts around Boulder County, says she kept hearing about Dyer’s art project with the Lyons Elementary students. The two got the chance to meet when both were nominated by Lyons’ students as community heroes this past May.

“It was really moving to see the impact that the work she did had on these kids even six months later,” says Steffens. “I was talking to some little girls [at the Hometown Heroes event] and they were really excited to show [their art]. My colleagues and I started thinking, how could we bring that out of the elementary school to tell stories of residents and even volunteer groups involved in recovery to capture different faces that have been [in Jamestown] and helping in the movement going forward?” And Dyer was more than happy to help.

“You know, I don’t like to call what I do art therapy, but there’s something really therapeutic about being seen and being heard,” Dyer says.

The commemorative event in Jamestown will actually be Dyer’s fourth Boulder County flood-related art project, following her work with Lyons Elementary, Congregation
Bonai Shalom and the recent BoCo Strong Flood Commemoration Week Kickoff
event on Sept. 7. Each interactive photography project gives
participants the chance to make a background for their picture, further
personalizing the experience.

“Some
of the messages, they will take your breath away,” says Dyer of the
microstories people share using the white boards she provides. In a
“behind-the-scenes” video of her project with Lyons Elementary, students
can be seen bearing messages that feel humble yet profound: “Use your
power to inspire,” and “Friends will always light the way.”

“I
met those kids from Lyons at their last day of their school when they
were at school in Longmont,” Dyer explains. “I didn’t tell them my
story, because they were kids and didn’t need to hear that crap and they
had just been through a lot. But I told them that a long time ago a
bunch of scary stuff happened to me, but deep inside me I knew I had
this light and I had this gift and I had something to say and that all
of that came to this and I had this idea [for the One Million Faces
Project].”

Archer says
that Jamestown residents established a committee to decide which events
the community would conduct. When Steffens came to Archer with the idea
of bringing in Dyer, Archer says the town “jumped” at the idea.

“Everyone
that meets Peggy kind of falls in love with her,” says Archer. “She’s
energetic and charismatic and caring. I think she helps bring people out
of their shell and empowers them to put a statement about themselves
out there, to be true to themselves, like: Everyone’s different, and
that’s OK.”

“I knew
right away [the people of Jamestown] would love her,” says Steffens.
“She has empathy, she doesn’t impose her ideas, she’s open to
collaboration, she brings high energy.

Fundamentally,
I think she’s emotionally resilient. She shares a message of openness
and collaboration and warmth … There’s something powerful and tangible
about seeing something created and even holding a sign … there’s a
physicality of the work and
the result of the art that Peggy creates. If we tried to do the same
project without Peggy, if we tried to replicate without her, it wouldn’t
be the same.”

At the
heart of this project, Archer says Dyer is helping the communities she
works with develop something they will be able to look back on for years
to come.

Dyer knows there’s something special about every face she photographs, every story her subjects share.

“The
only way we can do things in the One Million Faces project is through
magic — the magic of believing,” says Dyer. “Believing that something as
audacious as: yes, we’re gonna photograph one million people and yes,
we’re gonna shout these simple, powerful things from white boards that
connect humanity and yes, we’re going to make these messages count,”
says Dyer. “That’s just magic.”

“In
it’s most simple terms, those floods — whether it’s literal water
washing down a mountain, washing away your town, whether it’s divorce, a
pet dying, a parent dying, a car accident — those traumas are going to
keep happening and all we get to do is choose how we respond,” she says.
“Sometimes we respond and we’re like, this is really scary and it’s
awful, but you get to this place where you can say, ‘I’m going to stand
here and look at this journey and I’m going to keep moving forward.’”

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com